Day 3: Birthday Suit

Don’t forget to stand naked in the mirror and choose one thing you like about yourself every day of the challenge. Post your empowering song (or painting or saying) and one thing you are grateful for on each post as well.

Births and birthdays can be very telling about who you are. In the movie Big Fish, the tale of the main character’s birth (a tall tale, by the way), serves to set up the high expectation that he wasn’t going to be an ordinary person. In our lives, we have benchmark birthdays that we make a special effort to celebrate or comically dread. I have friends who celebrate not just their birthday, but birth week or even birth month, and I have friends who don’t celebrate their birthday for religious reasons I don’t quite have a full grasp on. Whether we celebrate excessively or not at all, our birthdays can be good stopping places upon which to reflect and think back over your life.

There are other significant birthdays that have nothing to do with your birthday that you can choose to celebrate: your baptism or spiritual birth, the day you graduated high school or college, your anniversary or marital birth, the births of your children, or your maternal birth, etc. These are moments in which we enter a brand new world, or at least see that world with brand new eyes. We take on new roles that define us–adult, worker, spouse, parent–and start writing on that blank slate with which we’ve started out.

Tell the story of your birth and any significant birthdays you’ve had. Tell how they shaped you or redefined you.